I don't know why. I try to list everything that's happened from start to finish. I even try to add the approximate dates, to add a tangible dimension. When I think of something new, I tuck it into the list at the appropriate spot. It's like rolling a stone up a hill. Occasionally, I lose this list and have to start over.

I wonder: if you kept a diary with an entry of the most significant event in every day of the past 25 years, and look back in print, can you remember that part of each day? Perhaps somewhere in your brain is tucked every event, however mundane that led to now. If you could look back, seeing all, would it make life seem longer or shorter; concrete or abstract; happy or sad?

2. Toronto

I coast down Bay street with a veggie vendor dog in my hand. A perfect dinner to eat while weaving through the bankers and money folk, skating home. The sun is hot, but muffled by the smoggy air. I keep my balance and look at each person's face, intrigued.

A beloved old friend from my home in Victoria works for a conservative talk radio station in Toronto. He's a producer, though is occasionally on the air. The station uses his Chris Farley rantings on their frequent promo pieces, which I find surreal.

"Why don't you do your listeners a favour and CLAM UP!" he says on the radio in the cab as a banker gets in, or out of the open window of an SUV.

That's the voice we've heard for years, of my friend, doing the late Chris Farley. That voice, me hearing it, is so normal. That voice provided a consistent piece of social backdrop for my last four years.

In the streets of Toronto, far away from home, I laugh. His hundreds of thousands of listeners, likely wearing suits and ties, and minding their own business, can't share my joke.

3. Pike

I stand on a riverbank in Northern Ontario and close my eyes. The numerous crickets create a ubiquitous thrum and I feel I'm in the middle of a sci-fi space battle. I'm on my way to the prairies to start a new chapter of life. I'm travelling with two others doing the same, who I'd met the previous day. Earlier while lying in bed, one traveller said that he'd never met his biological mother, but recently received a letter from her out of the blue. I didn't offer a response. He wasn't looking for one. I listened as the other two finished talking and slept.

I left the room in the middle of the night, hoping to see some stars (the stars are pale and few from Toronto, the origin of this road trip, and the place I'd spent a good part of the past two months)--but it is overcast.

Here, on this dock earlier, a local fisherman eyed my nose-ring wearily, and answered my question with a stony face:
"What kind of fish is that?"
"It's an Alaskan Eel."

I almost believed him. I used to fish for salmon with my grandfather on the West Coast, but had never seen a northern pike.

4. Driving

I'm in a car speeding through the green edge of Ontario with a guy named Scott from Toronto. His car is filled with almost everything we both own. Any second, we'll hit the edge of the province and fire out into the flat. The car has no stereo so we listen to a tape recorder the size of a small shoebox: Stompin' Tom, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley. We sing along between moments of silence looking at the landscape change.

Driving, singing, thoughts drifting. Out there my long-time friends are pieces fitting themselves into a jigsaw puzzle. Babies, engagements, marriages, lucrative nine-to-fives, mortgages, some combination of all of the above. Growing up, I pictured my mid-twenties very inaccurately--neither this nor that.

One e-mail I received the week before, distributed to high-school buddies, was glibly signed: "I wish I had more news to cry but hey, I'm 25 and I'm gettin a gut."

I feel lonely. Happy.